No Ghosts, No Mistletoe
by Stealth Noodle
Summary: [Persona 3] If anyone asks, Junpei is technically spending Christmas Eve with a girl. It's just not anything like a date.


**Title**: No Ghosts, No Mistletoe  
**Rating**: SFW  
**Wordcount**: 3786  
**Summary**: If anyone asks, Junpei is technically spending Christmas Eve with a girl. It's just not anything like a date.

**Note**: I went with the Japanese fandom name for FeMC instead of "Minako," because "Hamuko" is such a ridiculous name that I just can't put it down.

* * *

Junpei arrives first, to his own surprise. He sits down on the bench to wait, hot cans of coffee warming his ribs through the inner pockets of his jacket. It's not too cold out yet, but the sun is low in the sky; the kids have already cleared out of the playground. He cups his hands protectively around his container of takoyaki and drums his fingers.

Maybe ten minutes later, Hamuko comes racing up the steps to the shrine, scarf trailing over her shoulder, a plastic bag bouncing from her wrist. "Sorry!" she says once she's caught her breath. "I ran into this guy I know at the convenience store." She knows a lot of guys. "Anyway, I got onigiri, croquettes, and cake."

"I got coffee and takoyaki," Junpei replies. "That's a balanced meal, right?" She laughs as he pulls a can of coffee from his pocket and tosses it to her.

The pop of the tab fills the pause as she sits down next to him. "Open yours so we can toast."

He does. "Sorry it's the crappy canned stuff. I was gonna stop by Chagall, but the mall right now, ya know..."

With a crooked smile, she pokes him with her elbow. "Who cares about the mall?"

They set the rules earlier: no talking about boyfriends, girlfriends, or Nyx. Paulownia Mall, festooned with lights and teeming with lovey-dovey couples, is probably borderline. Junpei's been avoiding the place ever since the decorations went up; an evening at the arcade isn't worth imagining how the lights would play on Chidori's hair.

"Yeah, who cares about that stuff?" He raises his drink. "To my number one pal."

"To _my_ number one pal." She taps her can against his with a muffled aluminum clink. They take their first sips together in a moment's companionable silence, listening the dry rattle of bare branches in the breeze. The coffee's pretty awful and barely lukewarm.

Digging into her bag, Hamuko says, "Croquettes first? Before they get too cold?"

Junpei's takoyaki is already cold, so he nods. She pops open the plastic case and passes him one of the tiny bottles of tonkatsu sauce, along with a pair of chopsticks. He snaps them apart and eagerly dives in.

Around a mouthful of croquette, he says, "'Too cold'? Dude, it's like they just came out of the fridge!"

She huffs. "Hey, if you don't want yours, I'll eat 'em."

"I never said that!" He's learned not to show weakness when sharing food with her; he once lost custody of an entire side of fries at Wuck after expressing too much distaste for their sogginess. "Watch, I got this."

As he draws his Evoker, Hamuko's jaw drops, giving him an unfortunate view of chewed croquette. "Are you _serious_?"

"It's not like anyone else is here."

She swallows, glances around, and says, "Well, hurry up! I wanna see what happens."

What happens first is a careful search for a fireproof place to set the croquette, which ends with dusting off part of the stone path and pretending that it isn't still disgusting. Trismegistus flares into physicality just long enough for a burst of Agidyne. Junpei aims for the air well above the croquette, and for a moment he thinks it's going to work. When the light fades, though, all that's left is a scorch mark and a sad wisp of smoke.

"You found the enemy's weakness," Hamuko remarks.

Junpei's sigh buzzes his lips. "Let's try again with one of yours."

"No way! Try again with one of your own."

He eats the rest of his croquettes cold.

They take down the takoyaki next, then the onigiri. It might not be great food, but it's satisfying, and Hamuko is Junpei's favorite person to eat with; she makes the same happy food noises that he does and chows down with the same level of gluttonous enthusiasm. They're both going to be amazingly fat someday, he thinks. He hopes. He isn't going to think about the future right now.

Afterward they slump low on the bench, hands resting on their bellies. "Ahhh, that was good," Hamuko says after a long, contented silence. "I declare the Convenience Store Christmas Feast a success!" She raises her fist, and Junpei bumps his own against it.

He wants to point out how horrified Shinjiro would be by their dietary choices, but talking about Shinjiro can still hurt her, even if she hides her pain well. Junpei gets it; he never knows, until Chidori's name is actually out of his mouth and hanging in the air, whether he's going to feel like crying. Besides, rules are rules. Instead he says, "Still wish I'd brought better coffee."

"Next time," Hamuko replies, as if it's that simple.

He rolls with it: "Maybe we should bring a microwave, too."

"Nah, I'll just fuse something with a 'Gently Reheat' skill. I bet it wouldn't be the weirdest Persona I've ever had."

It's still a little boggling to Junpei how many Personas she keeps inside. Trismegistus, like Hermes, is _him_; it fits under his skin and flows with his blood, and it's hard for him to imagine having more than one self at once. He'd feel like he was locking a part of himself away every time he swapped Personas, and while he supposes that's something everyone does, all the time, it's just too weird when it's literal. It got easier not to be jealous of her when he started wondering what it would be like if everyone saw him broken down into a thousand telling pieces.

He's not going to take the bait and ask her which Persona she would consider the weirdest. The last time he asked a question along those lines, he spent hours trying not to think about which part of her Mara represented. He digs a baseball out of his pocket, where it's been poking into his hip, and says, "Wanna play catch before dessert?"

"Yeah!" She bounces to her feet as if she didn't just gorge herself. "You're a pretty big baseball fan, right?"

He almost knocked over his ramen cheering the last time a game was on at Hagakure. "You could say that."

"You're not in the baseball club, though. Do you not like playing it?"

"Nah, I do. I'm actually a pretty good batter. I visited the club during recruitment week and stuff, but... I dunno. I guess it seemed too serious for me." He squeezes the ball before lobbing it toward her, nice and easy. "When it opens up next year, I'm gonna try out."

She makes the catch and waits until he's standing to return the ball. "Tell you what, I'll cheer you on at your games if you cheer me on at mine."

Grinning, he tosses her a curve ball. "Heh, like you even have to _ask_ a guy to watch a bunch of chicks play volleyball."

The ball zooms toward his midsection. His reflexes are up to the challenge, but he lets out an "oof" as the force drives his catching hand into his diaphragm.

Hamuko cracks her knuckles.

"What I meant to say," he wheezes, "is that I respect you all as athletes."

"You're such a dick," she says fondly.

He returns the ball just a little bit higher than she can reach and watches her expression turn indignant as she unsuccessfully jumps for it. When she returns from chasing the ball all the way to the shrine, she throws it directly up in the air.

Junpei squints up at it. "Truce?" he suggests in the time it takes the ball to fall back into reach.

"Truce."

They toss the ball back and forth in an easy rhythm for a while, listening to the traffic on the other side of the fence. As chatty as they usually are, it's easy to be quiet with Hamuko. With anyone else, Junpei ends up blurting something stupid just to break then silence, but when he speaks now, it's because he has something real to say.

"Did I ever tell you about the Junpei Iori Christmas tradition?" When Hamuko shakes her head, he continues, "I pack up a bunch of junk food and video games and hit the town 'til I'm pretty sure my man's passed out. Last year I went to Book On, 'cuz it's not like a bunch of people stand around reading manga on Christmas Eve."

She doesn't laugh or look at him with pity; he doesn't even worry anymore that she might. She just nods and throws the ball before saying, "My aunt and uncle used to leave me home alone on Christmas Eve. I'm pretty sure it was because they could never find a sitter, but when I was a kid, I thought it was because I was super-mature and responsible." Her laugh is a little dry. "I don't blame them or anything. They weren't ready to have kids, and then all of a sudden they had to deal with me. That's part of why I decided to come back here."

The other part was the piece of Death sleeping inside her, yearning to be whole again, but they're not talking about that today. What's even left to say about it, at this point? "Well," Junpei says, "I'm glad you did."

She catches his toss and looks like she's struggling not to cry. He pretends to be interested in the bare trees off to his right until he hears, "Thanks."

Talking around is probably just as bad as talking about, so Junpei makes a lateral move: "Anyway, I never had anyone to hang out with on Christmas Eve before. Guys don't wanna hang out with each other when they're supposed to be with a girl, ya know?"

"Girls are a lot less weird about that," Hamuko replies. She puts a little spin on the ball. "When I was a kid, though, I never invited anyone over. I thought my aunt and uncle would find out and stop letting me have the house to myself."

He chuckles. "Betcha kept yourself company with all the snacks, huh?"

"Not _all_ of them. I had to save room 'cuz my aunt and uncle always brought home cake." Her gaze drifts back to the bag. "Speaking of which..."

Junpei's closer to the bench, so he says, "I'll get it." The bag is heavier than he expects; peering inside, he adds, "There's an extra onigiri in here, too. Wanna split it?"

Her eyes gleam. "Race you to the top of the jungle gym for it. Winner takes all."

"You're on!"

Hamuko's legs are shorter than Junpei's, and her arms are much skinnier, but she's the scrappiest person he knows; she scrambles up the bars like she just heard the scrape of the Reaper's chains. He throws his muscle into climbing, but he can't pull ahead of her.

"Watch your skirt," he calls, and her hand darts automatically to her backside.

She sputters as he takes the lead. "Hey, cheater!"

"Just bein' helpful!" He laughs until his open jacket snags on an intersection. "Shit!"

With a cry of triumph, Hamuko vaults upward and grasps one of the top bars. In the half-second it takes Junpei to catch up, she manages to perch atop the jungle gym like she's been waiting for hours.

She sticks her tongue out and says, "Loser fetches the snacks."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in."

As Junpei descends, she hooks her knees over a bar and hangs upside-down, scarf dangling, hands pressed to her sides to keep her skirt in place. "I probably should have warned you that I was Queen of the Monkey Bars in elementary school."

"Swings were more my thing. But I told you that before, right?"

"Yeah, I'm still waiting to ride one with you." She grins. "Hey, maybe we could talk Mitsuru-senpai into installing one outside the dorm."

"Ya think? Maybe we could tell her my exam scores would go up if I had a swing to clear my head..."

It's a mystery to him how Hamuko aces her own exams when she's constantly socializing, hanging out at the arcade, and going to Tartarus. Maybe there's something to that Quiz Game she likes, after all. About all Junpei can say for his most recent scores is that he didn't fail quite as spectacularly as he'd expected.

Bag in hand, he climbs back up the jungle gym, and Hamuko takes her reward. After a brief hesitation, she splits the onigiri in half, inspects the contents, and says, "Here, let's share. I'm gracious in victory."

"Or you don't really like umeboshi."

"Can't it be both?"

There are no hard feelings between Junpei and umeboshi. He scarfs his half down while she's still nibbling around the filling. "You're gonna be ready for cake after that, right?" he asks. "'Cuz it's almost the Cake Hour. Y'know, the hidden time where your stomach always has room for dessert."

Hamuko snorts. "Ow, geez, it got up my nose!"

Junpei's on a roll: "Yeah, the moon gets covered with frosting, and candy runs wild in the streets. Normal people go into a sugar coma. But a few chosen heroes stand against the sweets, with no weapons but their appetites!"

"Okay, this one's way better than your Pork Hour routine." She wipes her fingers on her skirt, then makes grabby hands. "Gimme the goods and I'll serve."

The bag wasn't heavy just because of the extra onigiri, it turns out; she bought a whole Christmas cake for them to share. A small one, but still a whole cake with six fat strawberries on top. He whistles appreciatively. "Man, I love your appetite."

"Like you're gonna have any trouble polishing off your half." She slides a plastic knife down the middle, then hands him a fork. They click the white tines together before digging in.

Sharing a Christmas cake with a girl has been high on Junpei's priority list ever since puberty. He's a quarter of the way through his share before he realizes that this is, technically, what he's doing. This is different, though. It's not that Hamuko doesn't count; it's that "girl" became complicated. Girls are Hamuko and Chidori and friends and strangers and all sorts of people in between, all of them with hopes and fears and feelings that aren't inscrutable mysteries. Nothing like the Monolith of Girl he used to imagine. Nothing like interchangeable parts.

The white of the cake and the red of the berries remind him of Chidori. Suddenly it's hard to swallow, like his throat is clogged. He must be making some kind of face over it, because Hamuko wrinkles her forehead briefly before taking an exaggerated swipe at one of his strawberries.

He blocks her fork with his own. "Back off, vulture! This lion's still workin' on his gazelle!"

She retreats to her own cake. "Don't lions sleep like twenty hours a day?"

"You play that Quiz Game too much."

The Cake Hour ends with plastic utensils licked clean and stashed back in the bag. Victory has come at the price of Junpei feeling like he'll never walk again without sloshing. As they let their food digest, the conversation wanders backward into an old debate over whether the Quiz Game even counts as a real video game. (It doesn't. It's Print Club for nerds.)

Before long, the sun has sunk out of view, leaving only an orange wash of light. They end up scooting closer to each other on top of the jungle gym, legs swinging and backs resting against the raised area in the center. The conversation peters out, but it's all right; they can be comfortably silent together. Junpei tips his head back to watch the stars come out and tries to remember his constellations.

"Have you heard the new N-Flow single?" Hamuko asks at length.

He's only vaguely familiar with the name; her musical tastes skew a little more obscure than his. "Nah," he replies. "Is it any good?"

"I'm pretty into it. They do this thing with bells, like, ding-a-ding-a-ding-ding." She leans in and offers him the right side of her headphones.

The song has a thumping beat, hip hop with a techno flair; it's probably something she's been listening to in Tartarus. Crazy how she runs around with her headphones half-on, shouting orders and attacking in time with her music. No wonder she's so graceful in a fight, with this kind of rhythm to flow to.

Junpei finds himself bobbing his head and tapping his foot against a bar. "Not bad, not bad."

"I hope the rest of the album is this good," Hamuko says as her MP3 player moves on to the next track. "It's supposed to drop January fifteenth. I can't wait!" There's a landmine buried under that topic, but she dances around it, humming. "Oh, did I tell you I found the fourth controller? We can finally do that Monkey Roller tournament with Fuuka and Ken."

Junpei grins. "Heh, you guys are in for such an ass-kicking. I am a Monkey Roller _machine_."

"That's what you said about Fatal Fisticuffs EX, too, and whose name is on the high scores list?"

"For _now_." He wishes he had a flashlight to point ominously under his chin. "And seriously, you're only there by _ten points_."

"That's ten points more than you."

"Whatever, I've got two hundred points on you in Mole Whacker."

"That's 'cuz you spend so much time whacking your own mole."

"Well, practice makes—hey!"

She laughs so hard that her feet kick the lower bars. Her arms are still, though, crossed tightly over her stomach, with her hands tucked into the pits of her elbows. Junpei frowns. "You're cold, huh?"

The beginning of a protest slips out of her before she sighs. "A little. I don't wanna go home yet."

"You should've brought a coat," he points out, like he's her mom or something. She makes a face at him. "Just sayin'. Here, we can share."

As he slides his right arm out of his jacket, she frowns and says, "You don't have to do that."

"Nah, it's cool. This is _why_ guys wear big coats."

"They're gonna kick you out of the boys' club if you keep giving away all the secrets." She hesitates a moment longer, then scoots in close enough that he can get his jacket around her shoulder. Her shivering eases.

Her arm chills him through her sleeve. "Damn, dude, you're a total heat-leech! No wonder those croquettes were cold."

She pokes him in the side with an icicle of a finger. "Too late! You can't uninvite me from cuddling."

"Hey, I never said I wasn't up to the challenge. I've got a fire-type Persona and untamed macho heat!" She's shaking again; it takes him a moment to realize that she's crying. "Shit, what'd I say?"

"Nothing. It's just—I'm sorry." Hamuko rubs her eyes with her sleeve. "He used to worry about me catching a cold, you know? So he'd let me curl up inside his coat, and I'd rest my head right over his heart, and—" She cuts herself off with a little shudder of a breath. "I'm sorry."

She came home one night wearing Shinjiro's beanie, and he didn't seem to mind until he noticed everyone staring at his hair, whereupon he snatched it back with a scowl. "I think I'm in love," she told Junpei later, and he egged her on. When their roles reversed, they played through to the same ending: gunshots in the darkness outside of time, clothing soaked with blood, and scars no one else can see.

Junpei has absolutely no idea what to say now, so he just lets his mouth move: "When I visited Chidori this one time, she was retying her ribbons. I asked if I could help, and she let me. I mean, she told me the whole time that I was clumsy and she could do it faster herself, but she let me. Then when I finally got it right, she smiled at me like she was really happy." He bites his lip. "She didn't smile like that too often."

"The first time he smiled at me, I felt like I'd made the sun rise." Hamuko makes a noise that might be a laugh or a hiccup. "Can you believe this? 'No ghosts allowed' was _my_ idea."

It's not often that he sees her like this. Sometimes it even feels a bit lopsided, how he unloads on her and she just smiles and helps him clean up the mess. "That's ghosts for ya, man," he says. "They just show up whenever they want. Ghosts are real assholes."

The next noise she makes is definitely a laugh, albeit a broken one. "I know, right?"

Then she falls quiet, and he doesn't know what to do except be there, warm and steady. She isn't shaking anymore. The moonlight gleams white from the pins in her hair.

After a while, she looks at him and says, "I guess it's hard to talk around this stuff, huh?"

"Yeah. I mean, we _could_ just not talk."

In unison, they snort and burst into laughter.

"Okay," Hamuko says once her breaths are even, "let's just get it all out. We're down to a week. How do you feel?"

"Honestly?" Junpei scratches the back of his neck. "I'm scared shitless. You?"

"I'm scared, too." Her voice is low and steady. "But it's the kind of fear that makes you sharp, you know? I'm _done_ with the kind of fear that shuts you down."

"I get that," he says. "I think... maybe it's okay to be scared. I'd rather be scared of losing things than stop caring about them."

She nods. There's a lot more underneath—thick tangles of "angry at" and "sorry for," lingering pits of blame, repercussions that will ripple out all over the world—but they don't have to go digging right now, or maybe ever. They don't have to ask each other what's going to happen on New Year's Eve. Maybe someday they'll even be able to talk about Ryoji without feeling all twisted up inside.

From the top of the jungle gym, they watch dog-walkers pass beneath the streetlights on the other side of the fence. A few cars roar toward the bridge. Outside the shrine, wishes clatter together in the wind.

At length Junpei says, "I bet my dad's still up."

"I bet my aunt and uncle aren't home yet." Hamuko's lips pull sideways toward a smile. "And I bet the beef bowl place is still open."

"Wanna hang around Iwatodai Station until curfew?"

Slick as a minnow, she slips out of his coat and dangles from the bar where she was sitting. She grins up at him. "Race you down."


End file.
